Transcript

Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week: The Hard Yards. The poet Chris Wallace Crabbe on The Poet's Manual and Rhyming Dictionary.

'A reference tool no writer of verse can afford to be without' says the Forward Press website of The Poet's Manual and Rhyming Dictionary. (Forward Press, incidentally, is the largest publisher of new poetry in the UK).

The author of the manual, Frances Stillman, acknowledges its limitations. 'Poetry', she says, 'transcends verse ... Poetry seems to partake of the miraculous...'.

Forget the miraculous. Here's Chris Wallace Crabbe to tell us about the hard yards.

Chris Wallace Crabbe: I have before me, compactly done in paperback, a book with the title 'The Poet's Manual and Rhyming Dictionary'. Why is it needed, anyone might ask. The latter half of the title is straightforward enough. After all, anyone might need rhymes for a birthday card or a bit of comic verse at a wedding; and if you looked up this work you would rapidly find that Eleanor can be rhymed with matador, Labrador, excelsior and Ecuador. You could even find rhymes for loincloth and lustful, but not for scissors, a word which Lord Tennyson found to be the most difficult in the language. However, we are not here to deal with Tennyson's personal problems.

But why does a poet, and hence poetry itself, need a manual? What's going on here? There's something fishy in the woodpile, it seems to me. As poets, we are after what I like to call The Thing Itself, total recall or grasp of an experience in the medium of words; being an art, this is also a craft, and so it probably needs to have a manual, something to keep near at hand, on the workshop shelf. And it signals the oddity of this surviving literary genre.

Even if we never read it, we all know there is something special about poetry and its use of language. My father, not a reader of verse, used to quote TS Eliot's magnificent

The sun was setting Like half a tinned apricot in a sea of junket.

Eliot didn't write the line, of course, but poetic licence came into it somewhere. And it did sound rather like modern poetry, which tends to be full of similes and metaphors, gists and piths.

Now poems are easily detectable on the page, because their right hand margins aren't justified. This may be a reason for a reader to skip over them and get on to some clear, sensible prose.

When I talk about the language of poetry, it will be clear I mean the modern lyric medium, and not that ancient, easier genre which told all the big stories of the oral tribe. Modern poetry tends to be dense, relatively difficult, and sometimes, paradoxically, 'pure'. You could say it is to everyday speech as cognac is to a bunch of grapes. It has been worked over, intensified, refined.

There are many ways of coming at this. The Irish master-poet WB Yeats said the best thing about the 'purer' kinds of lyric poetry when he wrote,

A single line will take us hours maybe,Yet if it does not seem an instant's thought Our stitching and unstitching has been nought.

What he was after, plainly, was the ars celia artist, the art that conceals entirely the sweaty labour of its making. Mind you, even before Yeats, Robert Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins were creating poems in which the language was worked up as densely as Christmas pudding. But leaving such dodgy Victorian practitioners aside, what is it that keeps on making poetry distinctive? What spice or subtle ingredient turns it into verse?

Let's go back to the beginning and think about this linguistic question of genres. If I take up The Poet's Manual and turn to the chapter that begins, 'How does the content of poetry differ from that of other literature, if at all?' I find the devastating observation early on that 'Most literature is written in prose probably for one main reason: poets are in the minority among authors.' Reeling back flabbergasted from this truism, I turn to the innocent author's entries on rhythm and form, knowing that the heart of the matter will be there, somewhere.

To get things a bit clearer, let's fare forward into the most useful sentence in The Poet's Manual. It is this: 'The pauses that mark the starts and stops of lines are an integral part of a poem.' As you brood on that observation a little, you are making your way a short distance into an understanding of poetic form. The printed poem is an island in a lake of white; it deliberately stands out, showing you what it is.

And the standing-out is deliberate enough. It tells us something by way of typographical layout, a luxury that ancient Roman poetry didn't have. It reminds a reader that, unlike the surrounding fustian, this little piece of language is to be treated with reflective care. It is to be sounded silently in the dark theatre of the reader's head. Because a poem needs to be heard, in some way, as well as seen.

In effect, poetry, unlike its dungareed cousin, prose, brings with it subliminally a long-gone past as singing, dancing and chorus, as a party in the warlord's mead hall or in the shaman's enchanted grove. It attaches itself to the past, as all art does in various declared or secret ways. No wonder so many poets call their poems 'songs', even without a musical setting. The shadows of all the past rhythmical harmonies vibrate and echo over its late-modern shape.

Frances Stillman, old-fashioned parent of The Poet's Manual, does not have much to tell us about the expressive power of sound in verse, except inasmuch as she talks about rhythm and metre; perhaps she was too busy filling the volume with educative examples of her own modest verse. Yet the aural discipline plays a major part in poetic meaning, in ways that go far beyond mere onomatopoeia. In revising a poem, for instance, I find nine times out of ten that effects of sound dictate the change; it is the ear that finds the new word or phrase. Think of famous lines or passages and you will hear how far their orchestration is intrinsic to their meaning. Take the famous lines from Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine

Is it not passing brave to be a king And ride in triumph through Persepolis?Or in a later poet, Emily Dickinson's Safe in their alabaster chambers -Untouched by morning -And untouched by noon -Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection -Rafter of satin - and roof of stone.

Some of the delicate force of these lines comes from the four graduated 'a' sounds in 'alabaster chambers', while the line, 'Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection' orchestrates 'e' seven times. And you can't say that these aural effects stand for, or represent, anything clearly, only that the poem would be deficient in expression without them. Poetry is partly its own music, the melodies and harmonies of language, which have increasingly replaced the musical accompaniment that verse once had.

Ezra Pound, who was also responsible for talking about 'gists and piths' wrote rather pretentiously that verse depended on three branches of poetics: logopoeia, melopoeia, and phanopoeia. For us ordinary folk, this meant that a poem is governed by its logical or narrative order, but also by its melodic organisation, and yet again by the chain or promenade of its visual effects. Pound was right in implying that all these things are emphasised in a poem. Poetry needs 'the complete consort dancing together'.

To take up that funny word, phanopoeia, and its implications, think how visibly Sydney, or else a country town, comes to life in the poems of Kenneth Slessor: one image gives rise to another, which begets a third, and so on; some of his poems offer no explicit argument at all, merely constructing associative webs of sound and metaphor. In just one stanza he offers us 'Scaly' ... 'fungi' ... 'tentacles' ... 'pitchy' ... 'stone-cut' ... 'juts' ... and 'frozen'.

Metaphor, ah yes, that's the big gun in a mild-mannered poet's armoury: one vivid thing standing in for a less colourful one. And it can be disconcerting, could even make a reader suspicious about its unearned power. A leading Australian novelist once upbraided me about the poet's indecent use of metaphor, as though he felt that my mob was stealing a march on him, poor soul. I defended my lyrical patch of turf. Yet even the poet Auden thought we were all a bit lazy when compared to the diligent novelist.

But maybe we aren't all that indolent, for all that we don't spend long hours in front of the bullying VDU, or even just the waiting sheets of paper. We are letting the patterned happening happen, the Muses dance in and do their pretty thing.

To use an old Freudian expression, poems are in general overdetermined: that is to say, every damn thing in their organisation contributes to their meaning. Or should I rather say to their congeries of meanings. This is true of a very good short story, too, but fiction does not have an assemblage of rhythmical and rhyming structures to keep us alert to high-protein patterning of the whole picture, the box of tricks, the back projection, the team spirit, and the figure in the carpet.

There is nothing innocent about poems, real poems. And the poets know this, consciously or subconsciously. They would understand exactly what Rudyard Kipling meant when he claimed this about his own writing process:

I worked the material in three or four overlaid tints or textures which might or might not reveal themselves according to the shifting light of sex, youth or experience.

Although Kipling's metaphor here suggests painting, it illuminates a writing method which any poet should recognise, in retrospect at least. We work the language as richly as we can, endeavouring to bring it up rich. At some level, too, we are doing the hard yards.

To summarise, in a string of utterances, poetry is language charged with orchestration; it is language which has had its primitive life given back; it should be read at least thrice; it should, moreover, be read aloud, at least in the muffled theatre of your head; it is an affront to haters of figurative language; it is the radiantly clear expression of confused emotions; it is the deepest way of writing against the death that is waiting for us all; and it can sometimes be the food of love, like music.

Speaking about the food of love, let me end with a highly metaphorical poem of my own. I do like titles and this lyric is called 'The Amorous Cannibal'.

Suppose I were to eat you I should probably begin With the fingers, the cheeks and the3 breasts Yet all of you would tempt me,So powerfully spicy As to discompose my choice.

While I gobbled you up Delicacy by tidbit I should lay the little bones Ever so gently round my plate And caress the bigger bones Like ivory talismans.

When I had quite devoured the edible you (your tongue informing my voice- box)I would wake in the groin of night To feel, ever so slowly,Your plangent, ravishing ghost Munching my fingers and toes.

Here with an awkward delicate gesture someone offers his heart on a spoon garnished with adjectives.

Well I don't know finally what this poem is about, whether it's a love poem, whether it's about metaphors, or whether it is a receptacle in which to use such lovely words as 'spicy', 'tidbit', 'talismans', 'groin', 'plangent'.

It's that kind of ambiguity, that kind of richness that poetry is about.

Jill Kitson: Chris Wallace Crabbe, and 'The Amorous Cannibal' is from his book of the same name. Oxford is the publisher. The Poet's Manual and Rhyming Dictionary by Frances Stillman is a Thames & Hudson paperback. And that's all for this week's Lingua Franca.